


Bright

by Silversheath



Category: Love Live! School Idol Project
Genre: F/F, Fantasy World, Stranded on an Island, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 14:35:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7467099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silversheath/pseuds/Silversheath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some truths that Nozomi has always known: The sun rises in the East, the merfolk live alone, and gifts have a price.</p><p>Enter Eli.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pasdechat](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=pasdechat).



> Thank you, Sarah! This was one of my favorite projects.

Every night for the week up until Ayase Eli got on the boat, it rained like Heaven was falling and slick, expanding clouds draped the world in a shimmering grey.

The moment she puts her shoe on the gangplank, her first step into her consigned fate, the moon comes out from behind those thunderous clouds with a ghostly blue halo like the touch of worlds above, and there’s a purple shimmer on the horizon; a tiny sunset.

**

There's a near-tangible expectation in the air, a certain jelly-like thickness that Eli can run her fingers through as she paces the floor of her cabin alone, her path tilting in sync with the ship. The whole place is a primed electrode; a dizzying readiness sizzles the air. Everyone on board has the tense, excited aura of one preparing to dive. 

Eli’s been waiting for her turn with the same tightness in her throat and chest area as she once had when standing by for word of her father's injury in the war - a closed off, sinking terror that bubbles up and boils as it gains strength and sears her insides. She doesn’t want to get married. She misses Alisa. Why, oh why, did her stepfather send her away? What does  _ forever _ mean to someone who wants nothing?

The boat groans, the wooden walls stretching when the waves shove the man-made thing back and forth, hungrily pressing forward and ripping backward. She wanders to her hammock and feels the knotty edges, rough and durable against the smooth whirls of her fingertips. Her lantern swings wildly above as the ship goes angled as it dances the waves, and her fist clenches. 

Going above deck takes some time. The floor is rolling like Eli’s drunk, sending her neat ponytail into a disheveled layer of sweaty tendrils. By the time she makes it out into the pouring rain, her pale blue dress is utterly grimy from running into the greasy hallways indoors, and her hair immediately gets coated to her face by the thick water splattering the deck. She doesn’t care. 

The only other person in sight is Derek, the ship's signed cook. He was very nice to Eli for the first week, listening intently to her nervous rambles, laughing and smiling. The second week, he changed almost instantaneously, drunkenly demanding to know why she wouldn't be with him when he'd been so attentive (never mind that she’s being sent by her father across the world to get married to some random noble across the world; never mind that she’s practically royalty and Derek is a hired hand, never mind that she doesn’t love like a  _ normal _ woman…) They haven't talked for several days since. 

"What are you doing out in this weather?" he wants to know when he catches sight of Eli. His eyes flick over her dress, pressed to her body by rain. Eli wants to retreat, but instead glides past as well as she can while the deck shakes. She puts her hands on the railing and glances down into the lengthening black waves. 

There's something, a glint, a sparkle of errant sunlight far below. Unsure, she squints and looks again, but it's just the darkness of a sea storm.

"Where is the Captain?" she murmurs, and Derek shrugs in the corner of her eye, a slow roll of his broad shoulders as rain rips into them both.

"He's not worried about it. It's just another storm." Derek seems to sense that Eli is going to leave when he offers nothing else, so he rushes in, yelling over the patter of water on the deck. "Everyone else is in the mess hall, talking about the plan for the next few days. We've had all these storms and stuff, so the trek may take longer than expected.”

Eli frowns into the reaching waves. "I'm just a girl crossing the Pearl Sea to get married," she says bitterly, a fresh tang of annoyance in her voice. “I don’t know anything about storms, or traveling, or how long this hell is supposed to be.”

Derek pauses, rain coalescing in droplets on his long nose. He's young, Eli realizes, probably a year of two even younger than her. "Don't be so hard on yourself," he mutters, looking away. "You seem plenty smart to me. But I'm just a cabin boy."

Eli isn't sure if she feels bad for this boy or wary of a new come-on, and she hasn't figured out a response when the entire ship bounces hard and cracks in two. The force sends Eli thrown over the side with a sudden, violent snap. Derek's face, pure white, is the last thing she sees as he slides inexorably backwards, into the twisted wood of the ship's rift. She's falling and screaming and there's rain in her eyes and mouth, or maybe it's seawater, and she can't feel anything because she's icy down to her bones.

The expected trauma of water and skin doesn't smash her body open, though. In some strange twist of fate, she meets the surface of the sea with perverted gentleness, an open whirlpool of feathers and softness. It's the complete antithesis to her rough approximation of a bed on deck. 

Eli splutters and struggles to tread as she looks up at the threatening primed wall of the ship. She spits saltwater and blood and tears and rain. She feels, all at once, the deadly whirlpool of the sinking ship. Like she's read, it'll draw her forward with inevitable force and she'll be crushed like the bug she is, spun around a god-sized swirl with innumerable metallic spires and the figures of her crew until she's swallowed by the endless ocean. She lets herself drift forward. 

Two rock-solid arms wrap around her chest, just beneath her breasts, and she's positively ripped out of the current and thrown like a pebble, skipping along the writhing waves for what feels like miles, dignity long gone and what seems like every bone in her body cracked. 

She sinks with gratitude. 

**

The return to consciousness is sudden - Eli’s awake, certainly, but doesn’t comprehend anything but the dense, wet feeling of sand against her back and a heavy humidity that lounges across her chest like a particularly disdainful cat at her stepfather’s castle. She opens her eyes. 

Green suns; two two spots of bright, impossibly piercing morning-on-dappled-leaves that lever themselves over her face. They swing over her, a flailing mote; once, twice, and then sweep down toward her cheek, where the scratchiest of kisses is pressed to her skin. Eli closes her eyes and allows her senses to fade.

**

Nozomi has never seen a human so close before. Returned to the sea, she ripples like a heat shadow around the shallows, walking on her hands with claws gently gripped in the crumbly sands to avoid being swept out any further by the lazy morning tide. She shakes back her patchy hair and brings her tail around to examine the damage from the sidesweep against a sinking ship on her lower left - the iridescent scales are matted, twisted from the sharp edge of the wooden ruts. She runs one hand along the oily, sleek surface of her tail and probes the rough break with retracted claws, mer-eyesight easily tracing the scales even in near-darkness . Blots of indigo blood ooze out when she presses, only to dissipate quickly in the clear water. She’ll be fine. 

Satisfied with her examination, she shakes back her tail and plunges her full body into the shallows, slithering easily through the misty sand that rises with the eddies of currents she produces as she stealthily advances to the shore. When she’s close enough, she coils her tail under herself and pops the tip of her head above the surface. 

As the saltwater lens withdraws from her outer eyes, Nozomi blinks streams of seawater from her hair and licks at her mouth, long tongue moving gingerly between fanged teeth. Her vision clear, she watches the human’s golden head bob along the shoreline, clearly hesitant in the doing but purposeful enough as the human - she? Nozomi’s eyes run down the body - rummages in the sand. Her blurred form is hazy from distance as she notices the wreckage of the ship, the skeleton that has washed up alongside her like an immense treasure. Nozomi isn’t sure how to assist - can she even do anything above water besides drag her bleeding fins along the coarse sand? - and slides back under, thinking. Planning. Hoping.

The human cheek, when Nozomi had kissed it, had tasted of sunlight.

**

Eli can’t find freshwater - the stretch of beach she’s stranded on suggests the hard curve of a peninsula, but she can’t see very deeply into the density of the trees, evergreens and reaching five-pointed leaves scraping the sky as the horizon melts into a mountainside like a picture. 

She’d be more afraid if she wasn’t so  _ relieved _ \- she’s alive, and able, and maybe she’s stuck on an island, but at least it’s a temperate climate next to a mountain, and the Pearl Sea just a week of off of Cameria isn’t terribly obscure. Surely someone will save her, but until then... Eli scraps sand off of her soles, and keeps poking around the dilapidated ship corpse in the weak morning sunlight, hoping for some useful stores of water and diligently ignoring the dismal prospects before her.

**

The territory of the Deep Sea Prince is not truly at the bottom of the Pearl Sea, but to reach the craggy trench gilded with fire lilies, Nozomi has to glide through low-hanging forests of glowing algae. She has to avoid aggressive fish with strange, bulging eyes that snap at her wispy fins with disturbing, curved teeth like slivers of moon. Lastly, she must bring a gift.

Nozomi soars through the water, excitement crackling through her gills as she bends and flows in her dark world, devoid of the sun, tasting the shapes in the water around her. Her hands clutch a fragment of the bow from the human’s ship - the Prince has always wanted more of the world he cannot touch.

When she comes to the crags of his territory, Nozomi slows down. There is no natural light at this depth, but while her eyes are almost useless, she can taste the currents in the water and she knows she is alone here in the dark and the cold. She swims forward, pausing every few moments to run her surroundings across her gills and sensory flaps, right below her ears, just in case.

It’s a good thing she does - the moment she tastes movement beyond the currents her claws are out and her tail thrashes, ready to pummel her neighbor with boiling water carved from her environment, but the rumbling amusement she can also sense stops her. It settles over the area, the temperature rising around Nozomi’s skin with a burst of sticky heat. She curls her tail underneath her body as fire lilies bloom around her in startling reds and golds, beautiful suns beneath the Pearl Sea that illuminate the dusty, twisting sands for miles, and the Deep Sea Prince is before her.

“One of my subjects come to greet me,” he hums into her mind. A few bubbles escape his winding maw, layered teeth like a particularly sadistic trap as he spreads his lipless mouth into a cold grin. 

“Prince,” Nozomi says, and drops the bow of the ship, where it sinks into the grainy sand. She doesn’t waste his time, shoving down any scrap of fear that bob to the surface of her thoughts. “You in your endless knowledge have word of the broken ship on one of your islands. There’s a girl, there. I... I want to talk to her.”

“A simple request,” he tells her, and with a whirl of his long claws the currents bend and sweep the broken bow through the water, where it lands in his hand in a flurry of bubbles, dyed brilliant vermillion in the light of his fire lilies. “Are you willing to pay the price?”

“What do you want?” Nozomi asks, because she thinks about the human and strength in her eyes that have no saltwater barrier; and the hair like spun gold, so unlike Nozomi’s barbed, shorn locks. Despite their form similarities, the human has something Nozomi doesn’t, some  _ determination _ . Something bright, that Nozomi could see during the storm. She wants to know more, wants to look into those eyes for days. “I’ll pay anything.”

So the Deep Sea Prince looks at her - or maybe he directs his gaze at her, with those flashing-scarlet lights playing across his face, she can’t tell anything past the flickers of shearing fangs he bares at her in a rough grin. Finally she swings her tail out, just a little, to move to a more comfortable position in the beaming silence, and the lilies burn harder, sharper. They are underwater stars.

**

There isn’t anything bright but the setting sun when she wakes, face-down in the shallows just around the curve from the human’s beached ship. Nozomi sits up, pulling back her claws to rub grains of sand from her damp face and vulnerable neck and blinks, grieved at the fact that her outer eyelids... aren’t descending? 

Or aren’t there?

A few flashes of fireflies on the island suggest nightfall. As Nozomi twists in the water at the hips to look at the falling sun spreading pinkish stains like oil-slick rainbows across the horizon, she begins to change. 

First is the reversal of her less  _ human _ traits - the webbings in her jointed fingers, melting back into her hands, her claws and fangs and gills closing, morphing into pale smoothness, delicate fins flattening into her neck. Next is the searing sensation of scales leveling themselves, sliding along her body, and evaporating as her tail sleekly splits to the effortless roundness of humanity and her hair elongates and softens. It’s all so fast, the feeling a pleasant tingle like sunbathing on outcrops of rock with nothing for miles, and then the change is done and she slides into a new body with seawater in her mouth as she coughs out her first human word:  _ “Eugh _ .”

Her teeth are so small. Nozomi raises one new, chubby finger and prods the nubs in her mouth, tickled at their uselessness. The sun is gone and she is human.

**

Walking the first few steps to the beach is not terribly hard, except Nozomi’s new feet are flat and soft, and every movement in the water is a new danger after she steps on a sharp shell fragment. The Prince has incredible magic, to change her and give her speech and strides, but he is not infallible, apparently. She wobbles to the shipwreck, avoiding the reaching wooden spires of the crushed shell that extend in every which way like a gargantuan porcupine with lances for spikes, and finds the human girl curled asleep in the belly of the dark, damp boat, covered by a stinking, moldy blanket. She’s already shivering, though the night has barely begun. She’s dehydrated, thinks Nozomi, inhaling the stale air of the boat and tasting coming illness. 

Well, that’s unfortunate. She can do something about that, at least. But first: Nozomi exits the dusty boat hull and circles around to what’s left of the mast, locating partially-rotting fabric in the moonlight that’s easy to tear. Knowing that humans dicate coverings, she awkwardly hunts out the least-damaged section and wraps a segment around herself, again and again until it’s tight over her chest and stays even when she walks. How disgusting and  _ hard _ . Humans are weird.

“Who are you?”

Nozomi cracks her neck a little bit as she whips around - the human is awake, holding a tarnished grey instrument out at her in dirty-palmed hands. It looks sharp. A knife? Or a torn bit of boat? The human clears her throat, a thick, tired sound, but says again, “Who are you?”

“I’m Nozomi,” says Nozomi as cheerfully as she can. Her voice is high and sweet, something like the calls of the birds she listens to in the fresh morning. 

“Lady Ayase Eli.” The human lowers the weapon, blinking back clear exhaustion. “I thought I was alone, out here. Were you on the ship, or are there people near the mountain? I’d love to get out of here, and soon.”

“I wasn’t on the ship,” says Nozomi haltingly. “And there are no humans on this part of the land. Just creatures. Lady Ayase Eli.”

“Oh,” says Eli, and seems to swallow something like fear, then tightens her control and glares. “Then how...?”

“You need water,” Nozomi tells her, observing the red-rims on her eyes and the slight tremor of her dirty palms and torn dress that doesn’t hide the pallor of her skinny legs. “I’ll bring you to a fount.”

**

Mer-senses are dimmed in her body, but Nozomi can always find water. The blare of the sea behind her blocks a majority of the misty call from the forest, but after a few moments concentration, she directs Eli roughly through the tangles of the pathless woods. Sharp leaves and stinking roots trip her at every step, and even Eli, with her weathered walking abilities, struggles through the obstacle-course woods. Nozomi wonders if she should reach out and take hold of Eli to guide her through the darkness until her world-tasting sensors grow in, like newly-hatched do with their egg-holders, but she’s inexplicably nervous at the thought of contact with Eli’s pale hand. They arrive at the slow, burbling creek, striped with moonlight, and Eli falls to her knees, shivering, and drinks straight from the ground. Splashes of ice-clear riverwater soak the earth around her, and her legs are streaked with dirty runoff from the dampness. Nozomi watches as she slurps down the water inelegantly with both hands, then shudders deeply - more exhausted than she’d seemed - and collapses. 

Nozomi picks her way to the girl - she’s only sleeping, still alive, good; and looks around in bemusement. What should she do to help?

**

The sun is a possibility on the horizon, a streak of pink beginning at the top of her vision as it slides inexorably through the canopy in pricks of woven light. Nozomi’s nearly through hollowing out a dozen light-shelled giant clams and filling them with freshwater, leaving them in Eli’s dark shelter. She’s just leaning over to set down the last segment, filled to the brim with clear streamwater in preparation to cart it back to the boat, when Eli mumbles in her sleep and her hand moves from her side, catching the edge of Nozomi’s hair as she’s bent over the stream. Nozomi flinches, drops the shell, and begins to itch. 

_ Ah _ , that’s a feeling; the sensation is internal, a rippling - her hands move to the sides of her throat, her stomach, her thighs, but the horrendous scratching doesn’t go away. That’s when the gills slit themselves open on her collar, and she bolts for the sea.

**

Eli has water on her face - her hands come up to itch her nose, and she scraps muddy droplets from her cheeks that streak across her palms like bruises. What? This makes her stand. She’s by a cheerful stream, a forest creek of clear water clearly flown down from the higher mountains inland and sweeping out to sea in a graceful rush. Eli stands up, brushes off her knees and chest from the clinging mud, and takes stock of herself. Thin, near-ruined day dress. Bedraggled locks of gold hair plastered to the back of her neck and cheeks. No broken bones, no suspicious wounds, alone. Alone. Nozomi?

After a thorough search of the immediate area that involved peering through brambles and squinting into the dense branch network high above, Eli decides she is truly alone. She comes across a wide, mangled shell with the depth of her fist twice over, half-filled with river water. 

What an odd dream. 

**

Nozomi dives, too fast. The water pressure slams against the membranes in her ears, her throat; a sickening push against the inside of her, but she keeps going because she’s felt worse things.

The coolness of her sea plunges into near-ice as her tail slaps through the water, hurtling downward through the incandescent algae forests. A guardian fish tries its luck with her, gargantuan hulking frame shooting out at her from behind a curtain of rock with bony teeth reflecting the gleaming algae lights, and she’s so determined her tail swings out, rigid. It vibrates as it does so, producing a vicious blast of boiling water that singes the guardian a hot-red in a blast, and it floats off, stunned and smoking, probably most regretful for messing with a mermaid.

The Deep Sea Prince is not in his dark world when Nozomi arrives. Belatedly she thinks of a gift. She opens her sensors as far as they will go and thinks as loud as she can, “Prince, what is your game?” There is only the drift of the currents and the shadowed forms of the fire lilies. Nozomi swims forward, catching the sense of a cave. Her hands come out as she scrapes the outside, all hard stone that does not crumble under her strength, even as she pushes. She follows the wall until she throws her sensors into the mouth.

Inside is a perfectly circular bowl carved of a giant pearl, big enough that Nozomi cannot get her hands about the crystalline rim. She sniffs the contents and confirms with her sensory organs: it contains a silver-and-pearl circlet, a tiny pearl that smells of a rainbow, and a blue mollusc with the taste of the sky. She waits, but there is nothing in the echoes of the slow-moving deep world, so she takes the bowl and begins the laborious climb back to the surface, and Eli.

**

Eli is not a fool. She has known this for her whole life, the moment she was three and her father died and her grandmother had sent her a few journals, handwritten things on papyrus paper written by her parents when she’d been born a girl and what she’d have to do to keep up the family name. They’d read responsibilities to her like storybooks, and it wasn’t until she was twelve, her mother remarried and Alisa nine, that she realized the common children did not worry about the kinds of things she worried about. The children of her servants considered the cows giving milk, harvest, the availability of customers, the concerns of the lords during tax time. Eli thought about if the sun would shine that day, and if she’d have to bring a parasol on visits.

But being a noble didn’t mean she had to be oblivious. She’s buried herself in novels since she was able to read, and then she’d turned to tasting experiences, learning from others about what it was like to exist in different lives. She thinks she’d like to be a schoolgirl, someday, just a girl attending the lessons and thinking about the future and how to make the world a better place with knowledge, and maybe a touch of optimism.

Tough luck. Eli is certainly  _ educated  _ enough, but she’s not  _ experienced _ . Her attempts to find water were basic at best, scouting through the shady woods in search of a downhill valley. Stringing up these tattered nets about her pile of saltwater-stiff fabrics of a bed inside the crushed pieces of her ship, yes, these are mediocre attempts to survive. Maybe she would have been better off shipwrecked if she’d not been a noble.

She roots around, taking occasional sips from the shells of freshwater, until she’s come up with a dull butter knife in the sand. With the help of some boulders some distance into the woods, she sharpens the malleable thing into something resembling a dangerous edge. Squinting, she spends some time looking up into the lush branches and overwhelmingly green world above striped with bands of palest blue where the sky leaks in, like a tiny floating sea sending swirls of gravity-defying waves. Does she want to be rescued? What’s at home now, besides Alisa, being prettied up as the next Ayase daughter to be wed off, and Eli’’s stepfather with his cool, bright gaze?

Before she loses her nerve, Eli kneels in the layer of pine needles at the foot of the mossy boulder, puts the crude knife level to her neck with choppy breathing. She hesitates another second, listening to the stinging calls of the birds overhead and the hum of the insects, and the knife slashes through her long hair, again and again and again, until the ground around her is gold.

**

Nozomi is ready this time. An hour before the sun sets, she crunches up some crabs in her claws and snacks leisurely in the shallows, keeping an eye on Lady Ayase Eli’s shelter. Her makeshift mast-clothing and the bowl of the Prince’s gifts are in the nook of a rock just above high-tide line, nestled safely like pearly eggs. Nozomi couldn’t open the clam, couldn’t get the circlet on her head past the sharp hairs. It wouldn’t lay flat, like she’s seen ladies wearing on human ships that cross the Pearl Sea.

She wonders what price she has paid to the Deep Sea Prince.

The change is smooth again, and she only takes a few minutes to practice her loping, wobbly gait before snatching up the meaty fish she’d gathered and wrapping her cloth around her chest and tying it off clumsily. It lies tight and bites into her chest, the textile uncomfortable over the swell of the human fixtures grown on her body. Clothing is ridiculous.

As Nozomi pads up to the ship, she sees the flicker of a small fire licking the edges of the other side. Eli, who is awake and has  _ much _ less hair on her head, leaps to her feet before her small flame, circled by stones on the sand in a tiny pit. She upends a clamshell of water, bony fingers scrambling in the sand in a kind of worn, hasty way, and holds a weapon in her hand.

“Nozomi,” she says, looking hurt, somehow. “I didn’t think you were real.”

An odd statement; though unsure, Nozomi feels her little human mouth split into a silly half-grin despite herself. “It’s okay, Eli!” she says, “I’m here to help you,” and feels a churn in her stomach when those eyes flash into hers. She cannot breathe for a moment - has the Prince given her bad lungs above land? But then it’s okay, it’s alright, the air comes back. Eli’s brows snap down into a mashed line of irritation.

“I don’t need help from some mysterious woman on an island. I think I’m imagining this whole thing,” she says, saturated with a bloody anger that barely holds the words. Nozomi is surprised, offended; but she holds her ground and looks at Eli’s sleepy eyes and shaky stance.

“The island is uninhabited by humans,” says Nozomi after a moment, and Eli sits down in front of her little fire and gazes impassively into the jumping orange light that paints her narrow face in deep shadows. Real fire lilies. 

They’re silent, in that creeping, thick kind of disquiet, until Nozomi gets to her feet. Eli twitches, pretends she hasn’t moved, and focuses back into her flames, face set and nose flared. Nozomi retreats into the woods, thinking. 

Nozomi has seen humans before, many times - always the same type, dark-skinned men hoisting ropes and brooding ladies leaning over railings to catch a glimpse of Nozomi’s winking purple scales that reflect moonlight - but Eli stands out, brighter and darker. Clever, with her roving hands always searching for something useful, but a shadowed murkiness in her eyes. 

She returns to a bleary Eli half-dozing before the fire. Nozomi plunks the armful of firewood onto the sand, jolting the human into full consciousness. Eli drags a grainy hand through her tufted hair, and Nozomi compares this to the flowing stream of raven-feathers on her own head. They regard each other with silence, one side much icier than the other - Nozomi surprises herself with how upset she is at the rudeness. As if she doesn’t deserve it, for showing up in mysterious circumstances and telling a worn young woman that there is no more hope.

Eli whispers, “I don’t think I’m going to be rescued.” Nozomi seats herself down across the homemade fire pit and picks at the shells in the sand with her fingernails, watching the flickers of smoke play off of Eli’s face, shadows and spontaneous blankets of light revealing depths and coating her in flat, warm tones with equal whimsy.

“I agree, Eli,” Nozomi says, and curls her tongue around the name, wondering at the shape of it in her mouth. 

“Thank you,” says Eli after more quiet but for the gliding rush of the waves behind them. “Thank you for telling me. Are you... am I allowed to ask questions about you?”

“There isn’t much to say,” Nozomi says truthfully. “I am much more interested in you. Tell me your story.” Eli shudders at this, the motion a jerky convulsion of her bare shoulders.

“Well. I hardly have any reason to hold back.” She coughs into her fist, rolls her lips between her teeth, but makes sure to shoot Nozomi a furrowed, suspicious look. She isn’t going to forget her own questions. This makes Nozomi slip her smile behind a raised hand. “I was borne by a noblewoman. My mother. My father died later, I guess. It was horrendous for the family, I’m told, but I don’t remember much besides missing him.”

Nozomi raises her gaze, glad for the excuse to look into the strange eyes dyed purple in the flare of the flames. Eli tells her story carelessly in an exhausted, half-understandable voice, gesturing lazily with her slim fingers as if the lines don’t matter anymore. Her stepfather had come in and helped her mother bear a new daughter, Alisa, but the stepfather hadn’t had much care for Eli and sent her across the Pearl Waters to be married to a prince half a month away. “I was worth something to him, but only as a prize, as a daughter should be. Perhaps he didn’t appreciate that I was being groomed to duties more befitting a male heir’s charge,” Eli muses, and her hands dig absently in the sand, separating piles of dusty earth with her thumb as a drill. “I might have been a queen.”

“Did you want to be Queen?” Nozomi wonders if the Deep Sea Prince wanted his title, or the magic. Nozomi thinks she would be the Prince, but only if she were able to keep the fire lilies. What luck she’d give them, adorning her empty heart miles below the sun.

“No,” says Eli, more curtly now that her monologue has been interrupted. She sharpens her gaze and peers back at Nozomi through the embers of the slow-dying fire; Nozomi, queerly, cannot hold the look and focuses on the crash of the sea, the damp scent of the air. “I... actually, I wanted to be in the navy. It wasn’t considered a viable option for a noblewoman, though.”

“Because of the caste you were given to,” Nozomi surmises. 

“Born into,” corrects Eli.

Nozomi ponders this information. Her kind hatch in the Sapphire Trenches and fight for the right to leave, to be borne up into the Lit Waters by egg-holders who only take the strongest from the darkness. What they become after sprouting their final fins is up to how they survive. Well. She’s learned some things of humans from the seagulls and the terns. They make things harder for themselves, struggle through their created worlds and sigh at the imaginary chains that they never envision a key to. “I’m sorry, Lady Ayase Eli.”

“Don’t be,” Eli says, startled out of her reverie. “I was never very good at being a noblewoman, or a normal woman, anyway.” She flushes, the tips of her ears garishly visible. Deprived of activity, her hands fall to the fish Nozomi has brought. After a moment, she starts to clean them, always moving. The burst of activity confirms what Nozomi has thought about Eli - she must be  _ doing _ , or else she’ll be  _ thinking _ . And Eli doesn’t want to do that, not out here.

She must be starving. After a light frying that involves slabs of fishy flesh on a layer of torn, scavenged iron, Eli peels the strips off the metal and swallows her disappointment with her late dinner. They don’t say much. Eli raises her knife with a chunk of meat stabbed at the end in a sheepish sort of shoulder shrug, but Nozomi shakes her head and Eli maneuvers the blade into her mouth, looking away again.

Eventually, she sleeps. It was bound to happen. Eli’s burned out in so many ways. Nozomi sits by the fire until it dies, sipping the salty tang of the air, harmonizing her thoughts with the whispers of animals in the forest, and falling in love with the world with a sleeping human breathing feather-soft by her side. When the sun waves the beginning of its fingertips above the horizon of the navy sea, Nozomi rubs the clutching sand off her thighs and walks towards the water.

**

As the sun sets and Nozomi slips again into golden humanity, she touches the roundness of herself; face, thighs, elbows and curious, wriggling feet, comparing her form with Eli’s high cheekbones and slim fingers and thinks that maybe she’s a mockery of humans. Maybe she doesn’t look like a  _ real _ human, the kind that other humans would like on sight. Or think was attractive. If that mattered. But she shakes off the water, droplets flinging from her long, pillowy hair like tiny rocks, and when Eli sees her approach through the descending dusk she smiles, catches herself with the motion, and then pretends she hasn’t expressed any pleasure and turns back to her critically important duty of tending the fire. 

But Nozomi’s seen that smile.

Days pass like this, with Eli patiently forming and upgrading a hut carved from the hull of the dead boat. Nozomi brings her thick fish from the ocean. Nozomi shows her where the colorful birds roost and holds the torch higher, higher, when the human scales the trees and calls down, “I think these are nuts!” Nozomi’s heart stops as Eli wobbles with her pretty hands clutching at the thick trunk, but Eli always slides down blithely and tells Nozomi to stop looking so worried.

**

Eli may be concerned that her nobility is a hindrance to survival skills, but with a hidden mermaid on her side, Nozomi eeks out a life for her, and gives her sociality; a companionship. Eli is alive, and she eats and drinks and explores, but Nozomi likes it best when she sings.

**

It’s on the end of the first week that Nozomi comes up to the beach as per her usual routine, just past sunset and after meddling with the Prince’s gifts that consistently refuse to yield their mysteries to her. Her claws cannot dent the sky-blue clam. The circlet does not fit her head. The pearl is just a pearl... probably. In any case, Eli is expecting her and the nightly gift of food from the sea. Nozomi holds out the fish, which have started to smell a bit ripe, and Eli takes them with the traditional murmur of thanks, cleaning them at once.

“I made salt,” Eli says proudly, and displays a scant handful of slightly singed flakes for Nozomi’s amused viewing pleasure. “I did burn it, though, since it’s hard to get a consistent temperature on a bonfire. I’ll get better over time.”

“What do you use salt for?” asks Nozomi, and the creepingly familiar look of Eli’s suspicion drives needles into Nozomi’s skin. A human would know what salt is for.

“To make the fish less bland,” Eli explains anyway. 

Nozomi never eats with Eli, but tonight she takes the thin clamshell, remnant of her first try with Eli, and grips a piece of sticky, salted fish. “Try it,” Eli orders dispassionately, but looks invested with the way she leans forward. Nozomi can feel the heat of the fire, the pressure of Eli’s gaze, the unbalance with lack of tail. Nozomi’s terrible nub-teeth work hard, but the fish is mushy and easy to consume anyway. It’s odd and heats the inside of her mouth, and she rolls her flat tongue on the bit and thinks about how it tastes the way fresh smoke smells.

**

They talk a lot at night. Eli is always so tired when Nozomi turns up that sometimes she just hands out sawed-off sentences, chunks of thoughts like meteorites that land in wildly different places across the land. “My sister saw me off at the dock. When I got on the ship, it was raining very hard. My cat gave me this scar, here,” she points at her ankle, “because I was too slow to feed him one day. I was afraid of the dark when I was a child, but after my father died... everything was dark.”

Sometimes Nozomi tries to keep up, but she feels the gap between them, between their existences. Nozomi tells her what she can: “My favorite color is purple. I like tuna and dried seaweed. I have never been rich, or spoken to a noble. I’ve been alone most of my life.” A girl from a world of cages and a maid from a world with no light. It’s amazing that they can speak at all, really.

“There was talk of a war with Salarenia, when I left,” Eli confides in a hushed tone. “I guess I’m glad for this island, rather than being some queen or with my stepfather as battle took place on our land. That would be the worst of it.”

Nozomi watches through her lashes and thinks there isn’t a place she’d rather be than here on the sand with Eli. The words tilt on her lips and she murders them, a soundless death, and lets them sink into the sand rather than pass across the fire.

“You’re good company,” Eli continues, “if a little strange.”

“You think I’m strange?”

“Oh, not badly,” comforts Eli, and seems to notice she’s let her mind wander and thoughts come out in segments rather than lines once again. “I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes, you stare at me, and I don’t know what you’re thinking, or if you’re even looking at me, really.”

“No, I am strange.” Nozomi is glad Eli has touched upon the ignorance, the interest of human things. It’s impossible to tell her the truth, though. Her throat glues itself around the verity of what she is whenever she makes an attempt; at this point, she’s sure it’s the Prince’s magic. “I like to look at you. You’re bright.” Unless she’s just a coward. She’s faced seamonsters and the bone-hooked nets of vengeful human sailors, though, how can she be  _ weak _ ? Then Eli looks at her - really gazes at her, hard -  from through the firepit and Nozomi has to think about that for a bit.

**

“Where do you go during the day?” Eli tries when the moon is dull like a coin and the water pats the sand like a comforting hand.

“I sleep, just like you.”

“Why don’t you stay with me more often? Why are you the only other person here? Why-”

Nozomi owes her these truths, but refuses to answer, blankly shaking her head, and she sees the bemusement rise in Eli. Sometimes there is suspicion, ugly and thick, but Eli is still polite, still holds back her deepest thoughts out of habit. Humans have much more control than mermaids.

**

Nozomi’s favorite conversation with Eli happens when the moon is full and the sea is hungry. It presses on the beach with fast, rough waves, pulling at the rocks like it wants to swallow the world. “You’re not sleeping enough. I know you aren’t sleeping,” Nozomi tells her. They’re sat outside Eli’s rough shelter, by the now-embedded firepit in the sand and rotating in turns around the flames to avoid the clingy smoke that furls itself at them, excitedly.

“What if there’s a rescue during the day? At nights, you are here, and I don’t want to miss that.”

Nozomi flushes. It’s  _ her _ fault Eli is sickening, withering from exhaustion.  “I sit with you while you fall asleep near dawn. I shouldn’t be distracting you so at dusk.”

“You never tell me anything about yourself, where you go during the day, why you help me. You make me laugh and relax out here, but I still feel alone.” Eli touches her neck, gaze turning inward as the sparks draw shadows through the creases on her narrow face. “What if you’re not real? Or not who I think you are? I don’t know who you are, really.”

“I think I’m real. I know me.”

“Well, tell me something I don’t know, then, to prove that you aren’t my own thought!” Eli says, ridiculously. This makes Nozomi squint as she puzzles through the logic of the sentence. 

“What if I give you a story,” she says, “something that you wouldn’t believe was real, and couldn’t think up yourself?” Nozomi’s eyes rove over Eli’s face. She likes the bony push of her eyebrow ridge, the line of her nose, and is afraid of the hollowness of her cheekbones. Eli is not as hale as she should be. Anyway. Eli jerks her chin up a half-notch; Nozomi has learned this means yes. Nozomi has watched all of Eli’s sharp partial movements that leak with crystal meanings that Eli probably isn’t aware of. She’s fractured stone with oil-slick intentions and rainbow feeling burbling from the center of her, and Nozomi wants to take in all the colors.

Maybe she can tell the truth. “Have you heard of the mers?” 

Another movement, this time of the jaw in a miniscule sideways slide set on an otherwise blank face. That’s a no. “The humanoids of the seas,” Nozomi whispers, as if describing what she is too loudly will provoke an early change and a fin will come spurting out her spine. It’s still the dead of night. Bugs chirp and drone and inland, the bullfrogs groan, deep and soothing. 

“The monsters?” Eli asks, and wrinkles her nose. “They haven’t been seen in decades.” Ah. Monsters, yes. Nozomi thinks again of her scales, fangs, and claws. Her tail is quite lovely, a royal purple jewel among the murky depths, and she  _ shines _ against the coral gardens with the gleaming fish and pastel reefs, but it’s fair for a human to look at a mermaid and recoil from the spikes and gaping, lipless mouths with layers of sharkish teeth.

“The humanoids of the sea war with the humanoids of the sky,” Nozomi tells Eli. “The angels will swoop down and take hatchlings that surface, if they’re small enough.” She knows of one young mermaid who was snatched like this. There is still the memory of the thrashing, the unholy shrieks of the flaming-winged creatures descending and the illustrious magma-shiny irises that haunt Nozomi to dreams, when she permits herself to sleep-drift in a safe cavern. “If there’s a hurricane, it means a battle is underway. The wind and rain outside the eye masks the conflict.”

“But angels live on the peaks of mountains,” Eli points out. “They primarily hunt birds, the way mers hunt fish. Why would they fly to the sea for some feud? Everyone knows angel wings are made of fire.”

“I’m telling you something you don’t know,” Nozomi scolds. “So listen.” Eli clams up, the pull of her eyebrow an equivalent to a loose, full-body giggle. “It goes back to when the First People were shaped, and choosing their domains. The fire-winged and the finned both laid a claim to the Perfect Land. The star children and the earthborn bore the vicious conflict for many lifetimes, but the battle wasted the Perfect Land, and it was split into huge chunks that created the world as known today.”

“Volcanos and floods,” murmurs Eli.

“Yes, the fight between fire and water that formed the earth that star children’s Kings rule,” explains Nozomi. 

“Humans are star children, mers are the finned, angels are winged, and the earthborn... are they witches?”

“No. A witch is a human with magic. All descendants of the First People have those among them with magic,” Nozomi says dismissively. “Earthborn are...” Oh no. The seagulls have not told her the word that humans have for them, and the Prince’s magic that gives her a voice has not extended to giving her a terribly expansive lexicon. “Animals,” she tries.

“Weres?” Eli says without judgement, and Nozomi seizes upon the kindness, embarrassed and excited for no reason that she can tell. 

“Those. We all came from the stars, however, and that is why humans lead the world today,” finishes Nozomi. 

“A gripping tale,” Eli muses, and rolls onto her back onto a leaf pile, flicking half of a ghostly grin towards Nozomi, who catches it with her eyes and treasures the movement in the near-total darkness. “Charming, really. It’s very different than what the sailors say of mers, vile hunters who capsize boats and tear crew members limb from limb.”

“Not unless they’re  _ very _ hungry,” says Nozomi as blandly as she can. Eli sighs and stretches; the vertebrae in her smooth human back  _ pop _ , the noises one-by-one distinct as the skipping of rocks on the waves. 

“You’re silly. Thank you for the story. I know you’re not my imagination... and I know I’m not alone,” Eli says softly, and her breathing slips into a level pattern. Nozomi inches closer, easing herself on the crinkly leaf bed until she’s half a foot away from a sleeping human. She likes how safe Eli feels at night, now, and watches the sea, agonizingly aware of the misty breathing of Ayase Eli at her side.

**

Then, this.

A routine like any other; the sun bids farewell, Nozomi rises from the sea with her golden legs having replaced her shimmering scales and tromps eagerly to Eli, who greets her and the gift (scallops, tonight, and a rusty length of chain that Nozomi found on the seafloor while exploring) with a most unusual glumness. 

Nozomi senses it at once- her organ arrangement is different as a human, but some tastes never go away - Eli is nervous. It doesn’t take long. Nozomi teases Eli for looking so pretty in the moonlight, for having uneven coral-bright hair that still looks shaped by the hands of gods, for being graceful and efficient in her motions while slicing at the hinges of shells, and Eli blurts, “I’m not normal, Nozomi. You can’t compliment me as you do, harmless and meaningless. It hurts my feelings.”

“What does that mean? It’s not meaningless,” says Nozomi, affronted. “You do look silver in the moonlight. It’s gorgeous, like the shape of the moon reflected off the surface from the reefs.” She’s given too much away; she bites her tongue, but Eli is too upset to notice.

“I love differently,” she admits, drops her dinner, brings her knees to her chest, and puts her face on the top, completing the picture of crumpled shame. Her tenseness suggests she’d flee - if she had anywhere to go.

“What does that mean? What does it mean to love?” Nozomi asks eagerly, confused, and Eli looks up in half-tearful disbelief, uncurling slowly like a flower for the sun when she realizes the hopeless sincerity of Nozomi. 

She clears her throat, unclogging misery in one short note. “It’s a feeling, Nozomi. It’s... when someone is more important to you than yourself. Someone who makes you feel less alone,” Eli says, the set of her face as still as the mountain rising far behind her.

“ _ I  _ love you!” Nozomi says immediately, pleased that she finally has a word for the grasping at her heart. Eli flinches back. 

“Ah,” she says, and the conversation stops there for the night.

**

Nozomi finds the change a little less pleasant than usual the next time the sun fades, an aching sunburn instead of a splashing tingle - nothing, she knows, has changed, but Eli’s silence has hurt her in a way she doesn’t bother to consider. She sets the prickly confusion next to the gifts by the rocks, and willingly slaps the water off herself and leaves her traditional resting spot in the shallow sand for the beach.

Eli is not by the fire, nor in the rickety hut erected behind the pit. Nozomi dutifully circles back to the rotting hull of the boat remains and sniffs around, poking her head into the dank, humid shell just in time to hear, “Nozomi!”

Bracing her arms on the ragged edges of the particular hole, one of many, that she’s got the privilege of investigating, Nozomi leans back too far and almost falls, unused to the way the joints in her not-tail bend.  _ Ah _ , she thinks, and she’s still not  _ good _ at using legs, but Eli waves her torch in the shadows of the rocky trees at the tip of the forest in a haphazard star pattern, just at the curve of the peninsula, so Nozomi staggers through the packed sand.

“Good evening,” says Eli politely, not a trace of hesitation in her voice. She stands confidently in her cutoff mast-dress that Nozomi helped rip and tie back on in a semblance of clothing - Eli had torn her original, matted dress to bits. “I’ve been in the forest at the base of the mountains all day. I’m glad I got back to the beach in time to catch you, though I’m a bit late, I think,” she says, and squints up at the moon, already rising. Batches of foamy white clouds dot themselves across the sky between the splashes of stars, a new universe high above. 

“Yes, I’m here now,” says Nozomi lamely. She’s still waiting for Eli to talk about last night, but conversation sidesteps the topic; Eli is a masterful speaker and launches the point of her venture into a neat front crawl through trepidatious waters. 

“Will you come with me? I’ve found an interesting patch of trees with white wood, surrounded by boulders. I think I could pound out a new blade from some of the rocks there. Pressure-flaking the stone, that is.”

“How far is it?” Nozomi calculates the moon, closeness of the sea, Eli’s hopeful expression, her own terrible footwork, and knows she’ll end up going.

**

Nozomi doesn’t get a flaming stick because she’s clumsy. Luckily, there’s just enough moonlight to see by, even though only segmented stripes make it through the canopy, like silver coins leading a trail. 

She becomes twitchy when she can no longer taste the sea behind them. They walk for what feels like hours. “Are we close?” 

“Almost,” Eli says, and holds back a pine branch so Nozomi might walk by without getting swatted with sap. How kind. “Do you have a curfew, fair maiden? I’ll make sure to have you home so your parents don’t work themselves into a tizzy over your absence,” she says, a rare playfulness flaring up in her tone.

Nozomi doesn’t know what love is, but for some reason the Prince has seen fit that she recognizes a  _ curfew _ . “I don’t think so. But I like to stay near the sea.”

“Seawater isn’t good for drinking,” Eli says breezily, and steps around a barely-visible tangle of roots. “What do you need the sea for?”

“I’ll dry up, like a sardine,” Nozomi says plaintively. “You’ll see me next with wide eyes and gaping mouth.” She mimics the expression of some of the fish she’s seen.

Eli startles a laugh out of herself, the impossibly dark trees flashing up bright with the ringing snicker that almost stops Nozomi’s heart. “That’s funny,” Eli’s head turns to Nozomi, focuses on her with cheerful abandon, “you’re funny.” A moment of walking, Nozomi struggling on her weak human ankles. “Thank you for making me laugh,” Eli says quietly enough that Nozomi knows she doesn’t have to answer.

From there it doesn’t seem to be necessary to talk - Nozomi points out, high above in the trees, a faded bundle of damp-smelling leaves, wound together and quaking with a paranoid hum like trapped rocks. Eli makes a  _ no thank you _ face, and they creep soundlessly away from the giant bug nest.

Not long after, Eli’s delighted face snaps out of the shadows as she grins at something in the distance, pushing herself through a patch of gnarling branches that grip at her hair. Nozomi hurries in her wake, bemused, and finds an oval clearing of ancient trees with willowy leaves blotting out the sky and Eli, standing some feet away, admiring a herd of slow-moving tortoises. Their shells swirl jade and painted, runic purples; bursts of dazzling reds that shine even in the filmy night. “Aren’t they lovely, Nozomi?” asks Eli, brushing a clump of hair from her forehead with gratified wonder, but she’s not let her guard down fully. One lumbers towards her with impressive speed, and Eli hops sideways to avoid the questing jaws and catches Nozomi around the neck.

“ _ Bwuf, _ ” Nozomi stutters, and there’s a crystalline moment where Eli presses her entire body to Nozomi. It feels just like the sleekness of the change, all lazy heat and skating, jangling nerves.  _ Oh _ . Then Eli pries herself off and looks faintly apologetic. They don’t say anything. Keep walking.

It’s not Nozomi’s coordination that hinders them - some time later Eli moves ahead from Nozomi, saying, “We’re close now, I recognize this rock format-” and promptly falls down a loose slope, gravel and weeds skidding in a spray of organic material as she drops out of view. 

Nozomi picks her way through the vines as fast as she can, sweating uncomfortably, and sees Eli wincing at the bottom of a sharp hill. There are clicking noises, thick guttural sounds coming from beneath the roots at the base like throaty grunts of something  _ big _ . She reaches the bottom of the hill in the same way Eli has.

They pick each other up, squinting in the moonlight and plucking rocks from skin, and see silvery eyes flashing at them from all sides. “Eli,” whispers Nozomi. Eli’s head turns, darting calculations and plotting the exits, but she bites her lip and reaches for the dead torch with deliberate care. The clicking gets louder and the eyes move closer.

Nozomi has no words for the hulking creatures that slither along the ground like it’s water. She knows the shape of their armor, names it in her mind as  _ scales _ , but automatically recoils from the grotesque overlapping of twisted, poison-green hides and slinking walk that’s far too sinuous.

“Those are some big lizards,” Eli mutters as five close in, half as tall as Nozomi and twice as long, sluggish but curious.

Nozomi bops one on the nose as it gets too close; it skitters back into the fold of its fellows and makes that disturbing clicky sound, then bares its teeth, all wounded pride and silver hate. Eli says, slightly softer, “Most lizards don’t have fangs like that.” The reptiles rush forward.

Her bare feet have the most impact. Nozomi kicks and knees the claws and fangs away, moving just too fast for Eli to emulate, a bit too strong for a human. Her delicate above-water skin shears off as it comes in contact with the ragged, metallic scales, harder than her own as a mermaid, like slamming herself into wall studded with torn rock. Eli has somehow lit the torch again, and a lizard shrieks as Eli lashes out in a whirl of vermillion heat. “Nozomi!” Eli shouts, and gestures quickly to a kinder slope across the way - Nozomi slips out from under a spiked tail and reaches with surprisingly graceful coordination, scooping Eli from the riot and half-dragging them through the bushes, smashing through foliage and briar.

“They aren’t chasing us.” Eli wheezes and takes the lead, dashing off with purpose, light as a rabbit. Nozomi staggers after her, a nightmare, covered in strange red blood. Her thoughts seem frozen.  _ It’s not purple _ , she wonders as they crash through the forest,  _ humans bleed red _ . 

Hints of light seem to hang on the edge of her field of vision like dismal stars; Nozomi swings her head this way and that as they erupt from the trees onto an unfamiliar stretch of rocky, torn beach. It’s lit a gorgeous, shimmering gold in the faintness of morning light that reaches for Nozomi, the wideness of the water calling out with piercing song.  _ Oh no _ .

Nozomi follows Eli to a patch of weedy grass not far from the water; Eli winces and bends over. She’s not too cut up, at least in comparison to Nozomi, who took the brunt of the onslaught, but there’s a particularly long gauge from Eli’s delicate cheekbone to her neck. Nozomi moves toward her automatically, hands on her skin, trying to see if it’s bad. 

She leaves a fragmented, splotchy trail of rust on Eli’s skin. Eli,  _ a  _ real  _ human _ , Nozomi thinks with unnecessary vigor, catches their hands together, puts one arm around Nozomi’s waist, and frowns down. Nozomi sees the gash on her own leg, a wide slit with too much red, and the world spins brighter than she’s ever seen as the sun flashes over the waves.

**

She wakes up in the shallow water, the tide lapping at her tail, to a glowing blue sun overhead – no, not the sun. She  _ knows  _ this brightness, has stared into it every night as it cooled and closed and sent lone sparks down her spine like touching the glaciers beneath the waves. Eli’s eyes. Eli leans over Nozomi, the brightness softening, and kisses her on the cheek. Nozomi thrashes her tail, seawater exploding over them in a shockwave as the lips brush the strips of fins that frame her jawline –  _ oh no _ ; she’s fully mermaid again, horrendous claws buried inches deep into the rocky sand, exposed disaster-spikes of teeth, iridescent purple scales and hair tangled like a stubborn fisher’s net.

“Thank you, Nozomi,” says Eli ignoring the drench of the splash, and Nozomi arches her back and launches herself into the deeper water with a thunderous clap of scales-on-sea.

**

Nozomi is not completely heartless. She swims furiously in the opposite direction of the land for some minutes with seawater pouring gratefully through her system like a rush, then, without changing her speed, reverses in a flippant U-turn and soars back through the water. It’s not worry for Eli that chases her like a shark, or the aches from the injuries still on her body, but the creeping shame. Foolish of Nozomi to break rules, to ask the Prince for great magic just to look at a human. Eli must find her loathsome, a liar, hiding from the shrinking truth that mers are ugly and terrible, violent creatures. Lesser.  

Ridiculous, to have thought she loved her. She’s not human and never will be. Mermaids were made for the sea to  _ stay  _ in the sea - look at her tapered tail, the gills at the flesh of her neck that sit parallel and deep. Maybe this is the price the Prince wanted her to pay, this strange flush on her cheeks and in her ribspace like her airsacs are pushing up against her heart. Breaking point.

This is what Nozomi tells herself, but she remembers that Eli kissed her after learning the truth. She doesn’t think that maybe she is just afraid.

Nozomi stays out of sight as she approaches the shore, and watches Eli stand at the edge of the beach, watching the water, looking for each other, but so far away.

**

Nozomi doesn’t change the next night, just keeps an eye on Eli, who eventually stumbles back along the coast to the battered ship, and her shelter. She stokes the fire on shore too high until the smoke scrapes the sky and covers the shore a stormcloud grey.

Nozomi doesn’t move from the water.

The next night Nozomi tries to sleep, fitfully, floating alone in her cavern far from the stringy light of the moon, but even with her eyes closed she thinks of Eli’s tired face and bony hands. This has to stop. She will retrieve the Prince’s gifts from the hidden rocks - unopenable clam, rainbow pearl, and silver circlet -  and ask him to take back the memories, to leave her be in the sea where she was always alone, but this time, alone in peace.

Having made up her mind, Nozomi goes to the shore on the third night to retrieve the Prince’s gifts where she hid them, undulating slowly through the water with something that feels a lot like hurt.

When she pops her head above water and drops her saltwater lids, she sees Eli and feels the heat and the shock like a strike to her chest all over again. Eli is  _ here _ with her back to the ocean and waist-deep in seawater, surrounded by outcropping of rock with Nozomi’s salt-crusted mast-dress slung over one shoulder and holding the sky-blue clam in her hands like a jewel. It’s so much to take in - Nozomi decides to slip away, but Eli’s slim fingers slide the azure clam open like the simplest thing in the world, and the pearl of pure light that sits inside is so striking that Nozomi gasps out loud.

The tide is coming in. Eli turns, eyebrows raised, and struggles in the water that is sloping up to her chest and pushes towards Nozomi, who can no longer speak with a human voice. She wades closer to Nozomi, cautious as though the legends are true and mermaids will kill and eat humans. Or maybe she’s nervous that Nozomi will flee from her problems again. 

She’s still holding clam with the pearl of light - Nozomi can’t leave while it’s there, it’s the second most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, with the first curling her hand around it. The waves drift her forward, she doesn’t fight, and before she knows it she’s meeting Eli halfway in the sea.

Is there anything to say? Nozomi props herself up on her tail so they’re eye-to-eye. Eli bites her lip and curls her arms out at her sides, and the tide washes the Prince’s circlet directly into her hand that’s not holding the pearl. At first confused and then steely with a threadbare determination, Eli plucks the silvery crown from the water and maneuvers it onto Nozomi’s humanoid head with hands that tremble with a touch of wonder. 

The light pearl expands like the lightning of heaven and  _ explodes _ , flattening the ocean around them in a burst of sound like the crack of rock, and Nozomi... is in the water in human form, in a royal purple dress that flows and bends in the water like a living thing, like a veil, like the delicate flow of a tail she will never wear again. She touches her head, which feels heavier. There are pearls laced throughout her hair, plaits of inky threads drawn up in swooping, interlocking braids. 

Eli is closer, says, “I love you too, Nozomi,” with such awful loss and truth in her eyes. Nozomi leans in, trying not to shake, trying to think.

Eli kisses her, and they hear a noise like earthbound thunder – the rainbow pearl, the last of the Prince’s gifts, still on the rock, erupts with an exquisitely  _ bright  _ light and reforms into a large, glossy boat.

 

  
  



End file.
